Thrashing Early

By Author: monikacis
Total Articles: 27
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This goes out to the app developers out there. The Webbers, the iPhoners and iPadders who are churning out all that virtual goodnessand badness out there.
My salutations to those of you who are putting in the hard yards. Who are ‘thrashing early' as Seth Godin would say. What does thrashing early mean?
Getting it all worked out before you make the thing. Every possible function's been thought of. The anesthetic's been worked over, draft after draft until the thing looks like a piece of art.
And most of all, the audience is part of the entire process. Not literally. That would be nightmarish. Crowd consensus gets people like George W Bush elected into office. No, I mean that you're considering your audience, your users at every stage. What will they think or feel when they use this or that function? Will they be satisfied, thrilled, or will they walk away disappointed, frustrated, even angry?
Developersyou're no different from us writers. We have to get into the heads of our characters and our audience. We have to know what our characters will think, say, or do at any given moment, in ...
... any given situation. And we have a fair idea of how our audience is going to react to our characters. Some are there to be loved. Some are there to be hated. And our worst nightmare is ambivalence, or worse yet, complete forgetfulness.
So, ask yourself this question. Are you creating an app that will satisfy, thrill and engage? Or are you creating something forgettable?
Here's some examples of what I would consider forgettable.
Sales Cloud 2 (a web CRM app)
Survey Monkey (an e-mail marketing app)
Webpage Capture (iPhone app for capturing stuff while browsing)
Fiscalfy (financial web app)
I've reviewed them all for www.appsummary.com. The first two I could take or leave. They're functional but bland, and there are a whole lot of other options in the CRM and e-mail marketing fields that I would use instead. Smarter, prettier options that were thrashed out early, that have a whole lot of design effort behind them.
The second twoI actively despise. So in that case I suppose they're not forgettable.
Webpage Capture and Fiscalfy are just badly thought out. There wasn't any thrashing that I can see. Some gentle, lazy wiggling maybe, but no serious thought process in evidence.
It's a crime really. Even bad apps take time and energy to build. So why would you invest that money and effort without planning it out first, making sure that what you're going to make is WORTH MAKING?!
So before you commit your time and effort to the coding, the making of something, before you take up the time and sweat of that group of talented and able developers you've recruited, remember to thrash.
What do we want the app to do?
What does the audience want the app to do?
How does our app need to look to stand out from all of the dross out there?
Is it worth making?
I'm looking forward to a virtual world out there that isn't swamped with the ill-conceived digital trash that I'm forced to wade through in the search for genuinely well-made and inspired apps.
Help me out here guys. Help your audience out.
Thrash!
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